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HENG SURE: May 29, 1977. Whatever your religions, it's okay for you to follow your spirit and become a Buddhist. Your God and saints are all Buddhists already, they know all about it and they think it's worth bowing to. They all took refuge many lifetimes ago.
HENG CH'AU: May 29, 1977. If you want to turn up the temperature a few degrees in the foundry, try closing one of the vents. Talking. Not talking has intensified the pitch and energy. Like a spray-to-laxer nozzle of a water hose--hard to handle at first, so focused and potent. More heat in the firing, more vajra result.
Out bowing a long, monotonous stretch through L.A. Country Club I reached appoint where I left I was going crazy--floating and disintegrating away, losing my body and identity. Sitting in full lotus after that hour at a deserted bus stop learn-to I felt tingling on top of my head.
There was no walkway on our usual side so we crossed over and went against the flow. The traffic was coming at us now. After awhile the discordance and erratic waves subsided. The cars were like the endless variety of false thoughts (go against the flow and they really pond and bombard.) some holder, honk, cheer, and curse. Some beautiful, plaint attractive, absurd. Soon they flow by without notice, without moving. A scream and a horn, I don't jerk or tense--just goes through, doesn't stick. When one finally does get me I feel it start from way inside my kidneys and lower stomach and shake in waves out.
A strange thing is starting to happen. While bowing, I am returned, brought back and reliving experiences long forgotten and buried. At least I thought they were. I find myself at the exact point and place where I went wrong and then all the suffering and karma set in motion by that choice unfolds before me and I relive not just remember, but feel the pain and the loss. For an hour or so I could barely hold back the tears. In contrast to the screaming well-to-do kids and grown-ups racing to somewhere past us for Memorial Day, I'm crawling along the ground crying and aching in my own "day of remembering."
"Did ya lose something, stupid, ha, ha, ha." If they only knew how true that was.
Specifically I went back through my family and followed the steps of cause and effect back to the family farm in Wisconsin. Deeded in the 1840's, the farm is still going strong with Joe and Betty and their boys. One branch splintered into the city, the others stayed near the farm in a little village called Freedom. Just before leaving home I returned partly to check out my path--retrace steps. The relatives in the city were a mess. Divorce, problems with their children, ill health, over-weight, smoking, drinking, and a deepening sense of loss and of having missed the boat was creeping in. As kids we only sensed bits and pieces of these trends. Now they had matured, come to fruit and it was so painful to see. Beautiful, warm people who got lost by choosing what seemed "the best life" "good jobs” something more exciting and worldly than the dull drudgery of the farm.
And the farm? What an oasis! Joe and Betty, a young couple in their 30's with three sons have restored the old house and property. They are vibrant, clear, without a trace of guile or cynicism. They sparkle and radiate health, good vibes. They love what they're doing. They do it together and they do it well.
Joe says "Well we don't drink or smoke and can't stay up too late. We have to mil ‘em at 4:30 a.m. Besides, we don't want to go out, people get souped and talk stupid. Can't tell their words from their rattling ice cubes after awhile. No we just stay and mess with the kids. It gets more and more silly out there and the farm—well that's my life. We like it; it keeps us happy and honest. Wow. I'd sell it in a minute that I ain't never found anything else worth doin'." Just got a letter from them. Joe and his son are going on a religious retreat together.
"You know," Joe told me, "I don't hunt or fish so I'm pretty much a loner that way.”
That day we split wood, milked the cows, went over family albums, and absorbed all the pure undefiled energy they had and that they sparked in us. When we left all of us felt turned on and cleansed, younger and without the "shadows that cross our minds."
Every session or lecture at Gold Mountain I left with a similar feeling of well-being. It's the farm and then some. Return to the one first; then find the zero.
How far I had gotten away from these roots really hit yesterday while bowing. I clearly saw and relived every step away from what the farm represented and more. I began to see how and where I had moved away from a pure, genuine self-nature. It hurt. Like a river having turned to go back to the pool, I had to walk through all the defilement and mud I had stirred up in each step taken from the source.
Yesterday was early childhood and specifically my first love--my wife. I feel like I am reliving and purging a lot of mud. How many lives does it take to return? How easy to follow the stream away. A single thought? To reverse is hard. To return slow and painful. Hard work and patience.
Persistent and complicated dreams of my wife. My mind moves and I wake up spent from the effect of these false thoughts. I am cold in the a.m. Need more clothes to stay warm. Heavier on fleet--lost the feeling of lightness.
Whatever happened to my wife's aspiration to be a nun? Karma upon karma. How many have been moved and effected by my steps away from my true face? And they in turn effect others, endlessly. From the one, the many. It builds, accumulates, wells up, and spills into disasters, calamities, wars. How to measure all the ripples created by a single stone tossed into a still lake.
Leaving the mountains (one's original face) for the valleys (desire and false thoughts), it's hard to return. The higher one climbs the more dangerous, narrow and steep. Less room for errors, greater consequences and tumbles.
The blackspire. A fall? Maybe the fall in not leaving home last year. Have to reclimb and yet its all in a single thought—not linear. So it is with the history of group collective karma; waves making waves making waves. Stop the stone-throwing, stop the thought.
How many lives have I repeated this? Who was my wife and so many people? Affinities, causes, and conditions, tests, failure, more karma all take us further from our true nature. The wheel doesn't stop, you must!
I Saw a Church Today
In Europe and many countries once upon a time much effort and skill went toward construction cathedrals and churches of magnificent size and beauty. Towering above all other worldly structures, they served to remind people daily of the impermanence of life and of a higher, spiritual existence. I saw a church today in L.A. I almost didn't see it except I was going so slow and going so low I caught sight of it. It was buried between towering corporate banks and skyscraper Insurance Plazas and wedged between two high-rise apartment buildings.
"No matter whether people understand or not, if you understand, you should speak." -Master Hua.
"You should not only explain the doctrines which I explain, but take the principles and express yourself according to your wisdom. Since Americans speak about the development in freedom, you can develop your own freedom in this way. Then there can be a new and creative development." -Master Hua.
If words and looks could kill we would have been minced monks by now. "Get off the sidewalk or…Move on, the sixties are over." Shouts a really angry, violent voice.
With cramps and diarrhea on a Sunday on Wilshire Blvd. in an area where lawns are manicured and even dogs use toilets, patience is tested with every body.
People tend to look lie what they eat and do. This area smalls of pork. It permeates the air, but no one hears the squeals anymore. "The 60's are over" the wars continue as do the barbeques, but it's a quiet Sunday here; easy, lazy.
The 60's are Over
A decade ago I was finishing my Ph.D. dissertation on "bringing the war home," trying to get at the root of the problem by analyzing American culture. But every time I dug behind the facile generalities I found people. I found people like my parents, teachers, friends and their parents. How did these regular people (they were not war mongers, running dog imperialists, Daddy Warbucks or fat cats), how did these folks come to generate so much suffering and conflict, so much unequality, so much hate and violence? It wasn't simple. It also wasn't the kind of questions an aspiring "professional" historian asks. Too "unscholarly” and "interpretive”--too general and "recent.” I quit school and went looking elsewhere. This tool had lost its edge.
I found the answer about your years later in a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco. I'm finishing my dissertation now on the road between L.A. and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, bowing once every three steps with a fellow Buddhist monk. As we bowed past a serene, lazy street in L.A. angry words shot out from behind a screed window, "Get off the sidewalk. Move on. The sixties are over." She was so right! The answer? I found it in a quote whose source is over 2600 years old. It really brings the "war home."
"All male beings have been a father to me in former lives and all females have been my mother. There is not a single living being who has not given birth to me during my previous lives, hence all beings are my parents. Therefore, when a person kills or eats any of these beings he thereby slaughters my parents. Furthermore he butchers a body that was once my own, for all elemental earth and water has previously served as the substance of one of my bodies and all elemental fire and air has formerly sustained the life of one of my bodies. Therefore I shall always cultive the practice of liberating beings, awakening to the eternal nature of Dharma (truth) in every life, and its instruction others to liberate beings as well."
Too much to swallow? Ancient sages and early Greek philosophers intuited it. Einstein argued it. And modern practical terms the thrust is this: everything comes from the mind alone. Look within for wisdom and for the cause, the beginning of greed, hatred, and stupidity.
What is stealing if it isn't misusing and wasting water, air, and food? What is greed if not consuming more and better, "all you can eat" and still never being satisfied? Greed gone big makes war.
Regarding anything short of all beings as relatives and family is discrimination and it breeds hatred and resentment. "Bring the war home," to the mind! Watch carefully what comes from your mouth, your body, and your mind and you will find the cause of hurt, strife, jealousy, and pollution. Follow it further and find the cause of wars, disasters, nuclear stockpiling, and acts of destruction. Follow the small to the large. Take the large back to the small. Back to the mind. It all comes from the mind. This disease is one disease. It respects neither age, nor class, nor race, nor country. We've all got it.
"For all past karma created from body, mouth, and mind and born from beginningless, greed, hatred, and stupidity I now repent entirely."
This is the heart of my Ph.D. The war came home to my mind and hopefully the peace will too. So "move on, the 60's are over." The real revolution is within one single thought right now, inside. Seize it!